For a number of years the doors of refrigerators have been held closed by cooperating strips of magnetic material. This required that the face portion of the cabinet surrounding each of the storage compartments include a substantial strip of magnetic material, normally a portion of the steel outer case. Also the gaskets normally included extensive strips of magnet material which were attracted to the steel outer case face portion to hold the door closed and pull the gasket to the steel outer case to form a good seal. Such constructions do not provide optimum heat sealing of the compartment, even though they employ relatively high sealing pressures. For example, the metal in the cabinet face portion and door flange, as well as the magnet, increase the heat conduction.
With the increased need to reduce the energy consumption of refrigerators, it is desirable to reduce the heat transfer through the door seal area. One approach has been to modify the cabinet and door construction so that there is less metal in the cabinet face portion. This leads to the need to substantially reduce or eliminate the magnets as the means of holding the door closed; which results in a much lower force being available to urge the door to its closed position.
With such low force constructions there is a need for the gasket to be soft and easily compressible to assure a good seal. At the same time the gasket must return to substantially its original shape despite many door opening and closing operations and despite the fact that during the life of the refrigerator the door will be closed, with the gasket compressed, most of the time.
At least most plastic materials from which it is reasonable to extrude flexible gaskets have fairly high coefficients of friction with the cabinet face portion. As a refrigerator door opens and closes, the contact wall of the gasket slides across the cabinet face portion. When the gasket contact wall/cabinet face portion have a fairly high coefficient of friction, the gasket contact wall will adhere to or "scrub" against the cabinet, resulting in poor seals and shortened gasket life.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an improved refrigerator gasket assembly.
It is another object of this invention to provide such an improved gasket assembly which requires only a small force to compress the gasket for a good seal.
It is yet another object of this invention to provide such an improved gasket assembly which has long life.